Preparing food dishes often involves cutting various food products into pieces of desired forms and sizes. Examples of such cutting includes slicing, dicing, Julienning, and wedging. On a small scale, these cutting operations are typically performed using knives. However, on a larger scale, various machines are used to assist with these cutting operations. Such machines range from mandolin slicers, to rotary-type food processors, to manual and powered slicing and other cutting machines. One type of cutting machine used in commercial kitchens for cutting hard food products, such as onions, bell peppers, potatoes, etc., is a thrust-type machine, which can be manually or automatedly actuated. In a typical thrust-type cutting machine, the food product is thrust into a set of blades that cleave the food product into multiple pieces. Depending on the configuration of the blade set, such thrust-type cutting machines can be used for slicing (parallel blades only), wedging (radial blades), Julienning (gridded blades), and dicing (gridded blades (following a pre-slicing operation)).